Summer Camp At Home
Fun activities to bring cooking camp to your kids from the comfort of home
It’s week 2 of our 4 week at home summer camp and this week we brushed up on some food skills and had our very own cooking camp! Here’s everything we did this week in case you wanted ideas for your own cooking camp, or you can get my pdf HERE where I share 70 pages of ideas, worksheets, and play activities.
Monday: Make it Monday
Monday is always our introduction to our camp week so I grabbed our suitcase and filled it with cook books I found at the library as well as some white aprons we’d paint so we could use them all week. One craft idea is to also take lasagna sheets, paint them with acrylic paint, and then break them up once they’ve dried. Next, you’ll take some contact paper and arrange your lasagne pieces into a little mosaic pattern. It’s a craft that anyone can do and is oddly relaxing so if you try one thing, make it that!
Tuesday: Taste it Tuesday
The whole idea behind cooking camp is to let kids be comfortable on their own in the kitchen so when I decided on our recipe for this week I wanted it to be something my 3 year old could do completely on her own from start to finish. We then saw pie filling in the store and my brain had an aha moment, we’d make deconstructed apple pie. This is probably a stretch calling it a dessert but it’s also insanely good so I’m not complaining. For this you’ll need:
graham crackers
pie filling
whipped cream
Take a jar and have kids break up graham crackers in it, then add some pie filling and top with whipped cream. It’s easy, kids have so much fun crushing the graham crackers and it’s SO good.
Wednesday: Water Wednesday
For the past 4 years I’ve created themed baths for my kids and I’m pretty sure it’s the entire reason my kids LOVE baths. For every holiday, birthday, season etc I’ve transformed our bathtub with toys, lights, and little things I find on amazon or at the dollar tree and it’s always so magical. This week for our water Wednesday I decided we’d take a vegetable bath after finding this toy If you didn’t want to buy anything for it you can just use toy pots and pans, some ladles, and plastic vegetables you have laying around. There’s no wrong way to make these baths so don’t over think it!
Thursday: Thinking Thursday
As a homeschool mom, thinking Thursday is always my favorite because it’s an easy way to add a little school into our day. This week we did 2 really fun activities that are so easy, like ridiculously easy, but also make a big impact! First, grab your mason jars and some heavy cream because we learned all about physical changes and made butter. This is such a simple demonstration to show how we can transform something from a liquid to a solid, plus it’s really fun to run around shaking a mason jar for 15 minutes (adults will probably have to help.) Then we took gummy bears, placed them in various liquids, and observed osmosis in action. I love to pair these activities with a video because I feel like it helps introduce our topics and it makes it more educational. Paid subscribers, I’m including these activities in my modified camp week pdf for you to have!
Friday: Fun Friday
Friday is all about having fun and just doing various activities related to our theme. First we made poptart pillows using felt, stuffing, yarn, and glue (like an insane amount of glue). This was one of those better in theory activities but I do feel like the pillows turned out super cute even if they took a lot longer than I anticipated.
If you’re ever curious about camp weeks, I create 70+ pages of pdfs that have activities for every theme you could think about here. Every day is divided into themes like you see above, and I include at least 3-7 ideas per day in case you’re like me and you like a little variety. For my paid subscribers, I’m including samples of my pdfs for free so you can get started on creating your own camp weeks!
Now that cooking camp is done, we’re taking the week off to go on some fun trips and then we’ll be right back just in time for music camp and I can’t wait to show you all of my ideas for that.
